Neverland
by 10ShizukaYuukiMistress10
Summary: This is not your usual story of fantasy, adventure and love. This is a darker take on Peter Pan with a highly amusing twist: it employs the cast of Avatar The Last Airbender, who face danger, threat and peril in this deathly tale. Read on at your own risk!


**Neverland**

 **Summary:** This is not your usual story of fantasy, adventure and love. This is a darker take on Peter Pan with a highly amusing twist: it employs the cast of Avatar The Last Airbender, who face danger, threat and peril in this deathly tale. Read on at your own risk!

 **Disclaimer:** I don't own Peter Pan. Nor do I own Avatar the Last Airbender.

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Tale One

The Lost Boys were almost like a whimsical myth. Katara had heard all the tales about them since she was a young girl: the embellished lies depicting the boys to be savages, cannibals, harbingers of death—skewering and slaughtering anyone who threatened to get in their way.

Yet there were other tales about these alleged Lost Boys. Such as the tales that they could fly, make themselves invisible to the naked eye and were the best hunters in all of Neverland.

"It's all nonsense…" Katara muttered to herself under her breath, trudging on through the foliage of the forest, on her way back to the village. She had a large container of water strapped to her back filled to the brim with squirming fishes of all varieties.

Lately, the controversial subject of the Lost Boys had been bothering her. Ever since her brother Sokka claimed to have seen one of them as he came back from a hunting expedition late at night, it had been the new hot topic of gossip in the village.

That had been a week ago. No one had seen the Lost Boys since. It could have been anything, whatever it was that Sokka sighted, but the whole village was still cautious at the prospect of those fearsome individuals. Katara could sense it in the way that the villagers moved differently, especially at night, as if the Lost Boys would pop up at any given moment like ghastly incarnations.

Katara knew her brother could have been making it all up, or perhaps he had over exaggerated what he'd seen, having forgotten the exact details after a good night's sleep.

Unfortunately, village mentality went a lot like this: people would believe anything they were told, no matter how preposterous or absurd it sounded. Katara wasn't sure that this was a good thing.

Sadly, Katara had to bring her daydreaming to a close. She was steadily approaching the village, and was about to pass the wooden entrance gates and make her way towards the market stalls. Up ahead, she could already see her brother, Sokka, making a massive buffoon of himself.

"It's no lie! I was this—" Sokka proceeded to position his index finger and thumb a few millimetres apart from each other. "—close to death! He nearly had me but I managed to escape in the nick of time!"

"Ah, so the rumours are true after all," Chuckled the crooked, elderly man Sokka was conversing with, patting Sokka lightly on the head like he was a big child. "Well, you showed those Lost Boys, son! The men of our village aren't to be messed with by anyone."

"Oh, well sir, it was all thanks to my quick thinking and nimble limbs." Sokka boasted, as he waved the man goodbye.

Katara plopped her container heavily down onto the ground. She could hear the fish thrashing tirelessly underneath the lid.

"Hey sis! Well that was fast! I was expecting you to take longer hunting those fish."

Katara wiped the sweat from her brow. "Well, I guess I'm getting better at fishing. So, will you help me cook the fish by setting up a fire while I skewer them?"

Across the other side of the village market, their mother was animatedly selling exotic herbs and spices. Katara and Sokka helped out by selling fish. Their father was a part of the village's hunting team, and brought back a wider variety of food for the village to eat, such as bears, deer, rabbits, squirrels and bulls. Sokka sometimes joined in with the hunting if their father let him. This was how they made their living.

Village life was actually quite fun. Although Katara had always wondered what it was like in other parts of Neverland, she was content with her life at the moment.

But could the legends really be true? That would have to make the Lost Boys thousands of years old. Older than her great-great grandfather. There was no way they could still exist even now. But then why did everyone still talk about them, or bother to mention them during bedtime stories? Was it to scare the youngsters away from forbidden parts of the forest or because the rumours of the Lost Boys were actually true?

There had once been an expedition that Katara's father had taken part in years ago, to try to search for the Lost Boys. Her father had been gone for months. He told her that after the first few weeks of scouting the neighbouring forests, his team had been forced to look deeper, into more treacherous parts of Neverland that man had never dared set foot before. They started to see more evidence that there could be humans living nearby: signs of life, such as carcasses of animals left behind, or rare footprints of the Lost Boy's slim, sturdy feet in dizzying rails which always ended at dead ends. This led their team to believe that they were dealing with something far out of their league: perhaps the Lost Boys _really_ could fly.

Her father had refused to talk about the rest of the expedition for many years, due to the shock of the life-changing journey, revealing to him treacherous, never-seen before parts of Neverland, out of the shelter of their tiny village. But he had recently begun revealing more parts of the tale.

Apparently, on the last night of the expedition, one of his team members had been sure that the Lost Boys couldn't be too far away. He suspected that they were hiding on the other side of what was later known as The Impassable River. They would have to pass one of two lagoons to get to the other side: one boasting bloodthirsty mermaids or another hosting ravenous sabre-toothed crocodiles. But the team had already decided that the risk was too high. So they called it quits and set up camp for the night.

He was sleeping nearby the lagoon when he heard a mermaid singing. Entranced by the hypnotic tune, he got too close to the edge and fell in. It all happened very fast. Everyone was fast sleep and the mermaid had wrapped a slimy hand over his mouth to prevent him from calling for help; he didn't know how he managed to escape—he should have drowned—but then he heard an authoritative voice shout an order and suddenly, all the mermaids went still and then disappeared under their icy depths. He remembered seeing a blurry face above him, and a gentle arm wrapping around his shoulder before he blacked out. The next moment, he woke up, his concerned team surrounding him.

After that, no more expedition teams were sent out to chase after what might just be a myth—it was far too dangerous. Especially if her father was certain that the Lost Boys had been following his team the whole time, watching their every move.

Katara remembered asking her father an important question about his adventure.

"Why did one of the Lost Boys save a member of your team?"

And he told her this: "You know, they may be real. But whether they're real or not, the important thing we should know is not to fear them. Yes, they may be dangerous but they have never done us harm despite myths and folklore. So, what I'm trying to say, is that maybe you shouldn't be assuming that they _wouldn't_ save one of us."

Katara skewered three small fishes at once and expertly set them to grill over the fire. She watched as Sokka added more wood to the fire and dunked her hand into her container to capture another squirmy fish.

There was one tale of a certain Lost Boy that had always captured her attention since a young age: Pan. Or, better yet, Aang, his real name. He was the most dangerous of them all.

And he was allegedly their leader.

"Does it matter whether he's real or not?" Katara berated herself quietly, blushing. It was that stage in her life: she was a teenage girl and now and again tended to indulge in useless, fanciful fantasises and daydreams—which would never come true.

Though it was no lie that everyone knew the leader of the lost boys, Pan, supposedly had magical abilities—powers. To manipulate nature and her behaviours. Like changing the rainfall at his command, depending on what mood he was in. Or sweeping a wildfire over the forests, wiping out whole villages at once in a fit of rage.

"KATARA! You're burning the fish again! OH, C'MON!" Sokka shrieked.

Katara look down to see a blackened, burnt out cod fish on the skewer in front of her. Hastily bringing it out of the fire, she berated herself for getting distracted so easily, especially over things that were not real.

But who were the Lost Boys? And could they truly be real?

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End file.
